Microsoft's quest to get indie games published on the Xbox One began in August with the announcement of the ID@Xbox program. Today, the leader of that effort said we could start seeing the first Xbox One indie games published in the first quarter of 2014.

According to Edge, ID@Xbox’s director Chris Charla stated, "I think it will be early in the New Year, in the first three months. I would say closer to the third month." That would seem to indicate that Microsoft is looking to publish the first Xbox One indie game sometime in March.

A few days ago, Microsoft announced that 32 game development teams had been picked to participate in the ID@Xbox program. Charla said, "Some developers started developing for Xbox One, others already had games in development and are working on Xbox One versions. I would say they’re at all stages of development, honestly." He added that it was "hard to say" just how many games would be released in the first wave of ID@Xbox titles.

As reported previously, the ultimate goal is to allow anyone with a retail Xbox One unit to use it as a development platform to make and publish games for the console. Charla said developers of all skill sets could, in theory, make Xbox One games. " ... from coding a game in C++, to someone who can’t code at all using something like Project Spark." There's no word on exactly when this will happen.